I grew up in a family of people who pray. While those prayers were rooted in deep faith and accompanied with a history of tradition and church, the premise of the prayers were to let our thoughts be known–to speak our gratitude out loud and to unleash the deepest desires of our heart and give them wings; transform them from hidden thoughts to something bigger–spoken words empowered with the belief that what we asked could be granted. I remember countless prayers for babies, my grandpa adding “our grandchild on the way” to the line-up of other grandkids’ names in his prayers before they were even born. Intentions for these little lives were spoken out loud: “Please give them health, protect them, let them grow up to be kind,” and later continued into more specific prayers: “Let her find the right college, please help him do well […]